Twang - by Laressa Dickey (Paperback)

About the Book

The volume of poetry takes as its inspiration the author's grandmother, who led an unconventional life in the American South, marked by independence, education, books, and reading, and an incipient feminism. Experimental in form and format, these poems pay tribute to female lineage in the context of place and region.

Book Synopsis

Twang offers readers the increasing power of the voice and the danger of one's words being used against them. What can save you can also make you wretch. Repentance, in Twang, is a great idea but something far off. What is the speaker offered in its place? You can leave. You can find some way out.

Review Quotes

By turns gritty and lush, Laressa Dickey's Twang destroys any notion of precise opposites to show us how the animacy of existence renders everything altered by everything else. Subject and object are at times beautifully obscured so that the acted-upon becomes the actor. Once you think you've got ahold of an image, expect a surprise--Twang takes what feels like it could belong to you, could fit in the palm of your hand, and explodes it, makes it too enormous to hold. In this way, you feel held, instead, even as you also tumble and plunge deeper in the service of more knowing. You may start in the ephemeral and find yourself in the colloquial. Lightning may crumble and dogs may bark with their fists. While Dickey paints a stunning portrait of a southern family subsisting on tobacco, she also insists on cutting that painting into strings and building an instrument on which to play her insistent, shocking song--a melody for the harmony of the man who invented Twang. It's a honey-coated howl. --Josie Sigler Sibara, author of living must bury and The Galaxie and Other Rides